Giving away an NFT is one of the best ways to attract an audience when promoting or marketing an NFT project through social media platforms.
Free stuff always attracts attention, and not many NFT collectors would say no to another NFT to add to their collection.
There are different ways to giveaway an NFT, each with some pros and cons for both you as the promoter and the recipient.
Done the wrong way, or not the intended way, could lead at best a costly campaign, or at worse bad PR.
The best way to giveaway an NFT as part of a marketing plan, is to mint the NFT and then airdrop to the recipient. This prevents the recipient from having to pay any gas fees from the giveaway, which could be taken negatively. Minting the NFT off-peak will save in gas fee and reduce marketing spend.
At a current average gas fee of $25 in 2022 on the Ethereum network, this practice works well for a small number of NFT giveaways, but a 250 NFT giveaway could cost up to $6,250 in gas fees!
This is on the basis that each NFT is minted individually. Minting 250 NFTs in one go would save in gas fees, but ultimately this is still a significant expense to market an NFT collection.
In this article we will look at the best ways to giveaway a small number of NFTs as part of a marketing campaign, and how to giveaway over a hundred NFTs whilst still hyping up your collection, keeping your audience engaged and keeping costs low.
Why giveaway NFTs
Marketing is notoriously the hardest part of launching an NFT collection or project.
It feels as if hundreds of other NFT collections are trying to launch in the same month, and with free open-source code, free courses on how to launch NFTs and OpenSea’s free NFT minting tool, the competition to launch and race to a $1million sell out has never been more difficult.
Twitter is the best promotional platform for marketing an NFT collection. No other platform even come close to the number of NFT buyers concentrated in to one relatively small niche.
There are an estimated 1.5million NFT buyers in the market today, which is still small.
The number of NFT collection launches are growing at a more rapid rate than NFT buyers meaning the spread is becoming thin.
Standing out is the only way to sell out, and standing out through promotions and giveaways on Twitter has long been seen as one of the top marketing methods.
Whether you choose to giveaway a few NFTs or a whole bunch, if you get the marketing right there’s no reason your NFT project can’t shoot to the moon!
Give away free NFTs
If you want to carry out a giveaway to create a buzz within your community, a free NFT is a good option.
Especially if that NFT has rare traits or specific value, with benefits or utility your audience will want.
If someone wins the competition it is a little unfair that they must pay for the prize, so asking the winner to pay for the gas fees to mint or transfer the NFT can lead to bad feeling, or bad PR inside the community.
Imagine winning a competition but you are then told shipping needs to be paid for.
To giveaway a completely free NFT you first need to mint the NFT (essentially create the NFT), then ask for the competition winner’s wallet address and transfer from your wallet to theirs.
During the transfer you will be asked to pay the blockchain validations transaction (gas) fee.
If the transfer takes place on the Ethereum blockchain the gas fees can be between $5 and $30 or more depending on whether demand is high or low.
Between 02:00 and 08:00 EST, or 07:00 and 13:00 UTC are the times of lowest demand on the blockchain, and usually means lower gas fees.
If though you are making the transfer on either the Solana or Polygon blockchains the gas fees are minimal enough that you can transfer any time of the day for a few cents at most.
If you haven’t yet launched an NFT collection then you will need to wait for just before launch and pre-mint some of the NFTs in to your wallet. Then you can transfer from there to the winners wallet.
Free NFT giveaways are usually done post launch, whereas free NFT mints are usually promoted pre-launch.
Give away free NFT mints
Many projects giveaway free NFTs prior to launch with either an OG, Whitelist or Free Mint competition.
The names may be different, and they are similar.
These are special lists that fans of the NFT project can win entry on to. The winner’s wallet address is captured by the project, and allows them to mint an NFT before the general public – and sometimes at a reduced fee.
For the winner it gives them the opportunity to buy in at a cheaper price, and be given a guaranteed chance to mint an NFT. The winner’s wallet is added to the smart contract before the mint dates.
A smart contract is essentially your engine. It is a piece of code writing in your blockchains native programming language with a set of rules on how each NFT should be minted, traded and where Royalties are paid as well as the percentage.
The smart contract will have the winner’s wallet addresses programmed in.
This means only those users who try to mint using a wallet where the address has been captured and on the blockchain will be allowed to mint.
If a user tries to mint the free NFT with another wallet, or wasn’t selected for a free mint, will be denied.
This means you can publicly share the website address the winners can mint their NFT for free, as only those winners will be able to.
The benefit here is a free mint is always understood to mean the buyer pays the gas fee, not the seller.
If you give away 250 free NFT mints, it means you will not pay a cent or a unit of Ethereum towards it.
Not only is this a great marketing tool, and a way to give an instant boost of visibility to your NFT project, but it comes with zero cost too!
Does giving away Free NFTs work?
Giving away free NFTs absolutely works but it must be combined with a solid marketing plan set out from the start.
Giving away free NFTs Twitter post after Twitter post, without a plan or direction, will only attract the wrong crowd – the freebie crowd.
These people will do everything they can just to get free NFTs, they won’t care about the project, won’t join the community, and will sell immediately they make any money.
To combat this many NFT projects ensured engagement into their project before an NFT was given away for free, and this was usually by creating a whitelist.
Recommended reading: What are whitelists and how to use them
By asking people to complete several steps before they could be eligible to join a whitelist meant those NFT freebie seekers gave up and went elsewhere.
Ensuring only those passionate about the NFT project were going to follow through with the steps and potentially be rewarded with a free, or reduced, NFT mint.
We can look at a case study of this using a random NFT project, Milkshake Friends (we are not associated or affiliated with them in any way, we chose them completely at random from our Twitter home page).
Here is the Twitter post from Milkshake Friends before an NFT giveaway:
And the following day after the announcement of the NFT giveaway:
Instantly a boost in engagement, followers, and Discord users. A glance at the comments, retweets and likes between the posts shows the huge spike in activity.
This activity is also a great sign to the Twitter algorithm, which in turn could mean they show your tweets to more NFT buyers.
Giveaways, if done right, can be the difference between a successful NFT project and one that fails to launch due to lack of followers or momentum.
How to Giveaway an NFT – In Conclusion
NFT giveaways are the foundation to almost every NFT marketing campaign.
Absolute free NFT giveaways, also known as airdrops, means the winner will not have to pay the associated gas fee.
On the other hand, if the NFT project has yet to launch then a free NFT mint competition will be the best option, as this saves the project funds. The cost is split proportionally between the free minters who will pay the gas fees individually.
Both options are a very low cost but tried and tested technique to raise the profile of any NFT collection.
